Tag Archives: podcasts

In which we discuss girl heroes, boy books, sexy zombies with whips, why proofing makes Alisa’s brain hurt, how many limbs get hacked off in David Eddings novels, and analyse what SF awards actually mean to us.

What have we been reading/listening to?
Tansy: The King’s Bastard, Rowena Cory Daniells; The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer.
Listening to: Starship Sofa 142 & 144, Notes from Coode St
Alisa: books she is publishing, including SPRAWL
Alex: the Belgariad, David Eddings. Worlds Next Door, edited by Tehani Wessely.

Pet Subject: SF Awards
The value in awards for writers/publishers/readers.
The value in awards when they become a long-running thing (ie does it mean more to get a Tiptree now that it’s been going for a long time?).
Difference between fan-voted, peer-voted, and judged awards.

TISF is a great monthly podcast which asks writers in the Australian spec fic scene to read one of their own stories aloud. The really cute thing is that Keith Stevenson, the mind behind TISF, actually posts a microphone and recording gear to each month’s author! Luckily I was able to assure him we have a microphone, which saved him the postage for one month…

Fleshy is a story I wrote for 2012, the first of the Twelfth Planet Press anthologies – a collection of near future stories. It’s one of the few stories I’ve ever written which I think of as “real” science fiction – it was even inspired by an issue of Cosmos magazine! I think it was two separate articles that sparked off the story – one about cloning technology and another about making art out of body organs. Possibly I am imagining that second article.

“Fleshy” is about a woman whose partner brings home an experiment in cloning technology – which she, living from home, has to live with. It’s a story about ethics in science and in relationships, with plenty of pop culture references in there cos I love them (plus, it being one of my story, tea and biscuits) and it’s kind of icky! It was also the first story I ever had shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards. I’m pretty proud of it, and it was fun to read aloud.

So go have a listen!

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Yeah, yeah. I needed a new Doctor Who podcast like I needed a family of squirrels in my laptop. But this one is really gooooood. I resisted many times, even when Nat from Nottingham (of Bridging the Rift) insisted how great it was, but finally I listened to the Ood Cast yesterday and fell in love.

It’s a gang of four performers who write songs and perform comedy skits in response to each episode, as well as chatting more seriously about it in the middle. My heart was won when they did a homage to Mike Skinner’s “dry your eyes mate” with a song all about River Song’s hallucinogenic lipstick. (damn, now I want to listen to the Streets all afternoon) Laura Simpson, the Ood brain behind the songs, is particularly talented, but the whole gang are fun to listen to.

Unfortunately only the most recent 10 eps seem to be available from iTunes, but they can all be found on the webpage. I know I’m going to be catching up with all of them! And next time possibly I’ll move a bit faster when Nat from Nottingham says I need to listen to something…

This is a story I am especially proud of because it’s the first piece of new writing I produced after Jem was born, and like my story “The Scent of Milk” was for Raeli, it’s a story that sums up the very specific feelings of having a new baby in your life. In both cases I deliberately tried to infuse the story with as much of the crazy that was whirling in my head at the time, in order to capture the moment.

With “Scent of Milk” I was overwhelmed by the closeness with my new baby, and how quickly she seemed to change day to day. I was late in my pregnancy when the “baby Montana” kidnapping hit the news, and while the story resolved happily, I found myself obsessing about what it must be like to miss out on a few days, let alone weeks, of your baby at that age. That turned of course into a story about changelings, and a mother’s hunt to get her baby back no matter what.

This time around, my thoughts were mostly about just coping with it all: with sleep deprivation, the great sibling balancing act, and trying to get back to work. There’s also that deep suspicion that everyone else is somehow doing better at the whole parenting gig than you are… and mixed in with that was books, writing, reading, and the business. I wanted to write a near future science fiction story that predicted what bookshops might look like in five years time, once the Espresso Book Machine and print-on-demand became more readily available, while at the same time “predicting” a rather alarming result from the current literary trend of mashing up classic books with supernatural movie tropes.

It was so lovely to hear the story read today and realise that actually, it’s exactly what I wanted to do with that story, and to top it off it’s read by Tehani, who is not only a good friend, but a suburban mum who, like me, had a new baby in the last year and understands a lot of what the story is trying to do.

Books and babies, babies and books. Luckily we were born with two arms, so we can juggle both.

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“Relentless Adaptations” can be heard here, and will be published in Sprawl, an anthology of suburban fantasy, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, due out in time for Aussiecon in September 2010.

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You can get a double dose of Tansyfic on the internet airwaves right now. Tehani Wessely reads my story “Relentless Adaptations” from the upcoming TPP anthology Sprawl on the Twelfth Planet Cast, and you can hear ME ME ME reading “Fleshy” at Terra Incognita SF.

Both are available on iTunes, too.

I would blog further, but we just got a freaking iPad and the household is in a total tizzy about it. Also I’m three quarters of the way through the latest Stephanie Plum and I won’t make any sense to anyone until I’m done with it – I’ve basically spent the day forgetting shit & bumping into things. Damned books. Some authors should be locked up.

I did get an exciting stack of mail today, though, including a certain book I’ve been hanging out for:

And of course, Trent couldn’t help it, he had to jump on the book trailer bandwagon too, though I think he may have missed the point just a tad.

I love my friends.

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I have a new podcast already – yes, I’m fickle! In this case it’s Will Write for Wine, a brilliantly funny, giggly chatcast starring romance/paranormal/women’s fiction writers Lucy March and CJ Barry. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to Galactic Suburbia – only about a completely different genre. And you know, they drink while podcasting. We so couldn’t do that – we’d end up with every episode FOUR hours long.

I started with Episode 62, in which Lucy & CJ relaunch the podcast after nearly a year away, having both changed the names they write (and podcast) under. Along with fun regular segments like ‘guess that word’ and ‘latest obsessions’ they have a fantastic crunchy discussion about the pitfalls, benefits and psychological confusions that come from reinventing yourself as a writer, and writing under more than one name. The other eps are good too, I am very addicted now. Mango mimosas for everyone!

Jeff VanderMeer blogs about the 50th bookiversary of the very awesome Aqueduct Press and asks that press’s supporters to reblog that link. I’ve been so impressed with the Aqueduct books I have ordered and read over the last year or two – The Wiscon Chronicles, Writing the Other and The Secret Feminist Cabal. (I just searched my whole blog to discover I haven’t actually reviewed this properly, how dreadful! Possibly I was too busy telling everyone how awesome it was on a one to one basis) So yes, Aqueduct Press is brilliant, I can’t go to their website without finding a huge list of books I NEEEEEED, and their shipping to Australia is swift and reliable. Go. Get books. Or at least read this great interview with L. Timmi Duchamp.

In which we chat about branding and female inclusion in the SF Hall of Fame, discuss our childhood genre loves, and keep derailing ourselves with excitement about the Australian leadership spill & the possibility that we might get a female prime minister tomorrow… GO JULIA! (featuring extra commentary from baby Jem, our political correspondent)

Amelia’s first zomromcom novel The Loving Dead sounds all kinds of awesome and if I hadn’t already pre-ordered it, I would be doing so on the strength of this podcast! The discussion of Kelly Link’s influence on how zombie stories can be told was also really interesting. Also the most recent zombie contingency plan I read was in a Glee fanfic. They get around!

The gang discuss the growing divide in the scene between short and long fiction as one is increasingly published by small/independent presses and the other by mass market. While I agree with this discussion in the main, I do think it should be pointed out that the one area this seems to not be true (and is becoming less true if that makes sense) is YA. I’ve been saying for the last couple of years that some of the most interesting work in spec fic seems to be coming out of the YA field. I’ve also noticed more and more mass market short fiction collections emerging from that field – they might have trashy titles and seem to be mostly about vampires, zombies, boyfriends and prom dates, but they are also featuring some of the most respected writers in the field, such as Holly Black, Libba Bray, the Larbalesterfelds, and so on. I see these books popping up in places like the local Big W (the closest thing Australia has to a Wal-Mart, I think) and can never resist picking them up, because even though sometimes they will have a bunch of cheeseball Buffy wannabe tales in them, there is almost certain to be a couple of real gems, and even the average stories are a lot more readable to me than the contents of an average issue of F&SF.

This is particularly noteworthy, I think, considering the massmarket paperback release of Kelly Link’s YA collection, Pretty Monsters. I’ve seen it a few places and didn’t buy it because I knew I had all the stories, but since then the very existence of that book has (quite appropriately) been eating my brain, to the point that I know next time I go into town I am going to pick it up. It’s a freaking Kelly Link book, and seeing it on bookshelves in my home town instead of having to order a pretty hardback from Small Beer Press is all kinds of awesome. I regularly lend out her first two collections, and I know that this is a book I will regularly press into people’s hands. So yes, I’m going to be buying it.

I’m actually completely in the mood to reread Kelly Link’s body of work, and not just because of Gary Wolfe reminding me how awesome Magic For Beginners was.

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Being a football fan didn’t come easily to me. It didn’t even come naturally. I was raised with a pathological disinterest in sport and it took a lot of effort to overcome that social conditioning. I developed an interest thanks to the support and encouragement of my good friends Kaia and Millie.

Me being me, this quickly turned into an obsession. It’s really not about the novel any more. I’ve seen Arsenal through two seasons, through joy and heartbreak, and I’m not going anywhere. One of the things that has added pleasure to my new interest, as well as educating me about the history, culture and in-jokes of football, has been the great writing by bloggers and commentators such as Arseblog, Gunnerblog, LadyArse, Lee McGowan, and Amy Lawrence of the Guardian. The weekly Arsecast was my first real podcast love, long before I actually started listening to the things as nature intended, on a genuine iPod. While the Arseblog has been my main cultural hub (this is where I learned to refer to international football fortnights as ‘interlulls’ and Liverpool supporters as ‘Mugsmashers’ which I embarrassingly assumed for a year was universal vocab before I learned that Blogs himself has a Liverpool-supporting brother who once smashed his Arsenal mug) I have had something to learn from each of these writers, and they have all contributed to my understanding and enjoyment of the game.

Our last season was significantly livened up by the addition of Up For Grabs, a brilliant, at times screamingly-funny podcast starring comedian Alan Davies and a bunch of his mates, ranting and raving about being an Arsenal fan. What I love most about this podcast is that it’s not just about the games, it’s about fandom, and it’s the first time I’ve really got a feel for what it must be like to be able to go to actual games.

Basically, I’m listening to funny men geek out about their obsessive historical perspective on their hobby. Sound familiar? I’ll get back to that analogy later.